Thursday 10/16

Another good meeting with a lot of progress made.  For those who couldn't be at the meeting, we are looking forward to catching you up ASAP to hear what you think.  I will do my best to convey a brief, accurate summary of our ideas.  First, some resources:

[Notes by Brandon]

 

Look familiar?  This is a sculpture called "Barrow" by Jill Viney.  It sits outside of Herron, right next to the window of the gallery space.  If I stand on my tip toes, I can see the top of it from inside the space.

Inside the structure:

An essay by Jill Viney, part of "The Artist's Voice" series from and organization called Yaddo.  You can find a link to the essay on Yaddo's website in the "Links and Resources" page [click here].

In the mid-nineties, I had the good fortune to visit prehistoric caves along the Dordogne River in France. The group was led by a museum anthropologist whose interest was early hominids. We hoped to see 12 caves in 9 days. Each day we traveled in a small bus exploring 3-5 hours underground and crisscrossing single lane roads above ground to our hotel. The group had a fervor for its goal, but the alternation between dark hours underground and light hours above ground made the trip seem like voyaging in a cocoon.
At Lascaux, a cave discovered in the 1960s, and visited by as many as 1,000 people a day, the cave deteriorated and had to be closed. A replica was built near the site. Since decades had passed, the cave had stabilized, and an original room could now be seen.
At 1:00, by appointment each day, five people could spend 20 minutes viewing the room. The group rotated patiently and my turn came. Traditionally in France, keys to a monument are given to a war veteran. The elderly man gave his speech about the primordial dream while we stood in three inches of chlorine to disinfect our shoes. The image of lost minutes ticking away in my head drove me to almost push the man aside, grab the key, turn the lock—when the guide opened the door. Straight ahead and high on a rock face were three stags with water to their chests crossing a swift river. They were drawn in bold strokes and exuded great vitality. Nearby, protruding from the ceiling and walls were boulders creating a bas-relief. The boulders had been colored a deep red ochre transforming them into reclining bison. These large animals filled the room with a monumental quiet resonance.
One of the last caves we visited was called Peche Merle. We started into the cave and found a generous chamber. Its walls were decorated with patches of negative hands and clusters of red dots.
Red oxide rock had been crushed into a powder and blown through the hollow bone of a bird. With a hand placed on the wall, the red powder had been blown at the hand, leaving a negative hand print: with thumb and forefinger touching, the hand was again held near the wall and red powder was blown into a circle. Hand after hand, circle after circle, spoke of an insistent creativity. The hands were particularly poignant because I felt the presence of those absent very strongly, a now and then duality. Many caves had multiple images overlapping since more than one group had used these caves. A new carbon study based on a fleck of paint has dated the caves we saw to range from 22-24,000 years ago.
We resumed walking. The path became narrow, singular, and seemed to turn back on itself. We lowered our heads for a rock outcropping. When we stood up and looked back, on the rock face were two astonishing horses. An elegant black line started at the nostrils, traced a small firm head, down a long neck to the withers and ended in a high rump. I couldn't take my eyes off the horses, energetic as if to move. My stare created a kind of tunnel vision, the horses seemed closer, and my surroundings blurred. When I returned to the "real moment," I realized the coordination of hand and eye in a cave artist worked exactly like my hand and eye and all contemporary artists. There was a vast chain of making that stretched through a long, long time and space.

---

My most recent work is a public sculpture, Barrow, on view at the Heron School of Art, University of Indiana & Purdue in Indianapolis. Currently, I am working on drawings that relate to that sculptural process.

Jill Viney, September 2009

So, what's this all about?
(Note: from here on out, please pardon my subjective musings on the topic, and please feel free to make posts correcting anything that I am misrepresenting through my personal lens).   
As a group, we decided to go back and explore the key ideas.  We attempted to reduce our question or statement down as much as possible, in order to provide some focus to our visions.  

I think our chosen topic is a difficult one to surmise in one or two sentences.  I am having trouble doing that right now: trying to succinctly state our goals.  This is good.  It means there is a certain level of complexity, I think.

What changes in perception occur when we view and analyze information through a context other than our physical reality?  Can the benefits and detriments be qualitatively analyzed in a way that provides insight into this question?  How can we gain a better understanding of the effects of constructing more and more of our reality outside of contexts that are physical and experiential?

We brought the conversation back to the fundamentals of our ideas, to the things that we were excited about when we first started talking.  We also took a much closer look at the space and the surrounding area.  That's when we started talking about "Barrow."

Of course, we didn't know it was called Barrow, or that it was made by an artist named Jill Viney.  It took several minutes of searching until Brandon found the information online.  We also debated whether we even wanted to know the information about the sculpture, but in the end our curiosity outweighed our desire to keep the sculpture a mystery. 

We quickly realized that the artist's motivation for constructing "Barrow" was directly tied to the questions we are exploring.  Related points of interest:

•  The Lascaux cave paintings were closed to prevent further deterioration caused by changes in temperature and humidity due to high levels of visitors.  After closing, a replica of the caves were built for tourists to view.  Surreal, and bizarre.  Ancient cultural property that can only survive if it is not exposed to viewers.  And the replica--it provides knowledge, and an experience unto itself, but though it is linked to the artwork in the caves, it is not the artwork in the caves.  Is it an adequate substitute for viewing--is it the next best thing--is it better, since this alternative does not cause harm to what is being viewed?
• Going inside of "Barrow" provides insight not found when looking at the outside structure of the sculpture.  Information found online provided perspectives on the sculpture that we would not have experienced in a physical investigation of the work.  To be frank, the sculpture did not have an impressive impact on us prior to our online investigation, and this was a prompt for us to further explore this piece as a focal point.  After learning about the motivations for creating the sculpture it suddenly became incredibly relevant, and that shift in perception of an object or a person or a work of art is exactly where our interest lies.

Our focus this semester has been on the ways in which we view and perceive the world around us, and, more physically, the window in the gallery.  We would like to literally take what can be seen from the window (Barrow), and bring it into the gallery by presenting all perceptions of the object other than the physical.  In fact, we would like to go as far as to block off entry to Barrow during our show, possibly even blocking it from view.  We may even create a physical "replica" of Barrow that can be entered and perused by visitors to the gallery.  I say "replica" in quotes because it would be a similar structure that would be deliberately constructed differently to reference the absurdity and irony in creating replicas of cultural property and artwork for public viewership and education.

[Since I'm writing this in my own voice, I'm going to insert a suggestion here that we also consider constructing a replica that we present for viewing in every way except for the physical, like Barrow.  We could construct it, and present it's information, images, etc along side or across from Barrow's information, but exclude the physical object from being accessed by the public.  Or, put the physical object/replica somewhere else in Herron, Herron's grounds, or the city???  Just another suggestion to throw into the mix.]     

[Also, as long as I'm using this moment as a personal platform for my ideas, another idea is to still consider blocking off the window inside the gallery and projecting a live feed looking out the window on to the gallery wall or onto the blocked off area inside.  The live feed would be "looking" at Barrow.]

Things to be doing RIGHT NOW (I think):

• Start contributing information to all other perspectives of "Barrow."  If you have a smart phone and a facebook or instagram page, consider taking some pictures, maybe a few selfies with Barrow, and posting them with bits of information about your experience.  The more we build up the non-physical persona of the piece, the more we have to work with in the gallery.
• If you take the social media route try to "friend" the rest of us and maybe tag us or do a #barrow or something like that so we can be alerted to new information created online.
• See what we can do about getting into contact with Jill Viney.  The best way would be to talk to the person who conducted the inventory of the public art on campus, perhaps they have the contact information.  I think it's prudent to be as well informed as possible about how the artist and IUPUI would feel about our idea.  We don't have to have full support to pursue this idea (though that would be nice!), but we still want to be able to respond knowledgeably to contentious questions.
• Continue to make visual diagrams or sketches of personal visions of the show.  You can post them, or e-mail them to me and I will post them. 

This is way too long for a blog post (though, I could keep going...).  That's the best I could do for a crash summary of our meeting.  I hope my individual voice is not too difficult to sift through and find the group motivations.  Looking forward to hearing all of our voices all together in the next meeting.